We started quite early. Tom and I had the equivalent of pregame jitters. We had spent a lot of time, energy, and money trying to upgrade the blog's capacity so that it didn't crash when we got the hundreds of thousands of hits that we thought we might get. Except for Lyle, none of us has press credentials, so we had to set up shop near the pressroom. The first case was United States v. Alvarez. We covered it on the live blog. Then we were actually expecting a decision in a second case called First American Financial, which had been sitting around on the court's docket for months. The court wound up dismissing it without issuing an opinion. Lyle got that dismissal on a tiny piece of paper and started walking away before he realized they were actually handing out health care, so he hurried back to the front of the scrum. Most of the court's opinions come out as little booklets stapled in the middle. They were simply unable to do that with this. There were so many concurring and dissenting opinions; it was a huge stack.

Lyle came out and sat with us. We had three copies of the opinion. Lyle and Kevin, our third partner in the law firm, were the ones to try to figure out what was going on. Normally when we're getting a decision, Lyle says "the court affirms" or "the court reverses," and I write that down for the live blog. Lyle's never gotten it wrong. He's been covering the court for over fifty years, and he's really, really good at this. But because this was such a high-profile case, we decided that all three of them were going to look at the opinion, and we weren't going to put out anything about the results until all three looked at it and agreed.

I put something on the live blog that said, "We have health-care opinion... parsing it asap." And then I wrote, "The individual mandate survives." We were just waiting for them to continue to analyze the decision and figure out what was going to happen with Medicaid. So I'm just sitting there waiting for what we're going to put on the blog next, and all of a sudden I start seeing these comments pouring in: "What are you talking about? CNN and Fox say the mandate has been struck down." I didn't interrupt Tom and Lyle and Kevin at that point because I knew they were trying really hard to concentrate, and I had full confidence that they had gotten it right.